Category: Joke

Don’t you hate those people who never change their profile picture on Facebook or LinkedIn? You meet them in real life and then it’s like “wait, what?” We can’t let that happen to our friend Aristotole Onagio, can we?

Caught a bit of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me this morning at the gym. This must have been the first James Bond movie I saw in the theaters, and boy does it make 1977 look like a long time ago.

A few funny bits jumped out at me:

James Bond’s Smart Watch

With the Apple iWatch announcement coming up right around the corner, who was wearing an early prototype? That’s right, good old 007. In his case, a good old Seiko digital watch that somehow was able to print out (in all capital letters) messages from the M5.

Smoking on Submarines?

Perhaps it was just an oversight on the part of the director — like the part where they were talking about the oil in Egypt — but these sailors were smoking on a British Sub. Surely that was never allowed, right?

Analog Switches Galore!

The movie tries to make everything look so super high tech by putting lots of nobs, dials and buttons on all sorts of machines. Here we are blowing up a helicopter with the push of a button:

How does your marketing department cut through the clutter and engage the sales organization? Today I’m announcing a great new feature for your CRM application: DroneForce, the drone delivery of leads.

Today’s challenge for the marketing department isn’t just generating leads. Using tools like Marketo, Pardot, etc., any competent marketing team can generate hundreds and hundreds of leads each and every day. And many do.

Yet, according to my friends at HubSpot, the typical sales person throws away nine out of ten leads given to him by the hard working marketing department.

The real challenge is how to get the sales team to take these great leads we’re generating and actually follow-up on them.

Sales People Are Special

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one CMO told me recently that he has resorted to giving out candy and beer to his sales team to get them to listen about the resources he has created for them.

“The problem with our sales department is that they have such a short attention span, they often just forget about the leads we’re sending them.”

Rise Of The DroneForce

Once enabled, DroneForce™ will solve all of these challenges. Using the same drone technology that has made our wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan so successful, our solution dispatches a fleet of drones from your corporate headquarters to deliver leads in real time to your sales team, no matter where they are.

There are a number of features that can be configured by your CRM administrator:

GPS tracking of sales reps via mobile phone; this enables the drones to deliver leads at the coffee shop, McDonalds or any strip club where the sales team is working.

Lead follow-up request; the drone will stay and hover until the sales rep actually makes a call and follows up on the lead. We’re still working on the partnership with TASER International that will shock the sales rep every thirty to ninety seconds if they’re not following up on the lead.

But Wait, There’s More

Now that we’ve launched DroneForce™, we’ve started a top secret program that will reverse the lead-generation paradigm as we know it. Our as-yet-unnamed product will dispatch drones directly to prospects, and hover until the prospect calls our sales team. I suspect that our conversion ratio will skyrocket, once we work out the kinks.

I’m a big fan of salesforce.com. My company, Cloud Sherpas, is one of its biggest partners, sporting over 260 Salesforce-certified consultants (and we’re looking for many, many more — see our job listings). Plus we’re tops in customer satisfaction and a salesforce.com platinum-level partner on three continents.

But we’ve noticed a few signs that some of our friends, colleagues and associates in the greater “Salesforce ecosystem” might be a bit too into salesforce.com.

How can you tell? With help from my colleagues at Cloud Sherpas — and a nod to BuzzFeed — here are 15 top warning signs:

Google of course has a close relationship with salesforce.com, so a little digging into the code behind the Google Glass reveals some pre-built integration with some features that are frankly amazing. Thanks to a source close to the Glass project I’m excited to show you what past generations of sales people would consider magic:

1) Facial recognition of contacts

When properly linked together your Google Glass and salesforce.com can be used to pull up contact profiles by matching the photo stored in Salesforce with the person that you’re seeing.

2) Activity creation

As almost all sales people hate entering activities into any CRM system, Google Glass has a special feature which will watch you as you go through your various daily appointments in your Google Calendar and log the proper activities automatically in Salesforce.

The next release will have a feature to mark certain activities as “private” so they don’t get automatically created as activities, but in the meanwhile be mindful of what you’re doing while wearing Google Glass.

3) Sales coaching

For a small monthly fee, sales managers can now directly observe and record the sales calls that their teams go on. No more flying to Indianapolis for that sales call just to watch Joe Salesman pitch a client. Now sales managers can provide feedback both after the call has ended or in real time!

I’m sure as time goes on we will find many more uses for the integration between these two great products.

Learn More

Adam is a senior vice president at Cloud Sherpas, one of the world’s leading Cloud Solutions Providers.